2014: The Year of the Sports Drone?

It's been a big year for drones; call it a banner year. Military drones keep doing their thing, unfortunately, but elsewhere drones are becoming commonplace. Stateside, the FAA is wondering how to regulate them. And civilians who can afford them are doing strange, creepy things with their drones, like flying them through homeless neighborhoods at night to see what the poor folk are up to. But no drones have announced themselves on the scene with quite the same fanfare as sports drones.

Back in October, remember, a drone dangling an Albanian nationalist flag caused an international incident when it flew low over a stadium in Belgrade during an international men's soccer match between the Albanians and the Serbs. Players brawled and fans went wild. "The game, expected to overcome historic enmities, was abandoned while the score was still 0-0," reported the New York Times.

More subtly, drones have become near-ubiquitous in action sports. It's getting hard to find a high-quality YouTube clip of a surfer or a mountain biker without helmet-mounted camera equipment and sweeping, panoramic overhead shots. You used to need a helicopter for that sort of footage. Now, all you need is a couple hundred bucks and a digital camera.

But as ESPN reported back in March, drone use in sports isn't all about broadcast footage:

"[T]heir main use at UCLA is for analytics that cannot be gathered from traditional uses of video equipment.

"Hand placement. Foot placement. Spacing," said head football coach Jim Mora. "When it hovers above the line of scrimmage, you can get a real clear perspective of spacing between your offensive linemen, or differences in depth of the rush lanes of your defensive linemen."

So is 2014 the year of the sports drone? Maybe. But one would expect their impact on sports to only grow. Franz Beckenbauer, for one, thinks we've only seen the beginning. Here's how Yahoo translated his recent comments on the future of drones in soccer:

"We are living in a century that's all about technology. We all know that it doesn't end with goal-line technology," Beckenbauer told Sky90.

"At some point, we won't even need a referee any more. Drones will be keeping an eye on whatever happens on the pitch at some point.

"I genuinely think this is the future. I won't be alive when it happens, though, so it's up to other people to fight it.

"This isn't something that's been discussed at FIFA. It's just a personal idea of me."

Franz Beckenbauer might be the best defender to ever play the game of soccer. He won the Bundesliga and the World Cup as both a player and a coach. Today, he's 69 and he does things you'd expect of a 69 year old who has achieved everything he set out to achieve—twice. He holds lofty titles with little responsibility—he's the honorary president of Bayern Munich—and pontificates about the beautiful game on both Sky Sports and in a column for Germany's BILD tabloid. People hang on his every word, because he's the Keiser.

But once in a while that ridiculous pontification can sound reasonable. And while there's no chance a drone replaces a ref in the foreseeable future, it's not so far out to imagine one replacing a linesman (or two), informing the center ref with robotic efficiency—much like the already-existing goal-line technology—when someone is offsides or a ball is out of bounds. Just don't expect them to use a flag to do so.